So I came home two weeks ago. I has been an interesting two weeks and a few things have come to my attention. What makes a place your home? To quote a great movie "Home is where you rump rest!" (ten points to anyone who can name the movie). It feels weird to me to be back it doesn't feel like home to me any more. Sure I know the streets I know to area I grew up here but it is weird to call it home. Rappenhof feels more like home to me then anywhere it feels like where I belong. But the problem still remains that I have people in both places that I don't want to leave behind. A friend of mine recently posted a meme that said, "You will never be completely home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more then one place." And that is very true for me there are friends that I have in Chicago that I hate to leave behind and there are people in Germany I can't imagine my life without.

So that leaves me with what do I do in September when my contract is up. I want to stay in Germany because I enjoy my life for the most part, I mean my job is easy and I'm around awesome people. However I wouldn't mind being back in Chicago so I can get back to working in a restaurant but there is a lot of stress with being in Chicago. I think today I feel like trying to get a job with Ringling Bros. and then going back to Germany. I don't know if that is possible but it is a conversation to be had when I get back. I do know one thing I don't think I will end up back in Chicago unless I have no other option. But I guess we will see what happens.

So this past week I had to go to a seminar, its a thing I have to do as part of the year here. I have to say at first I was dreading it I thought I was going to be stuck sitting in a room for hours having to listening to people talk in German about things I don't care much for, but it was quite the opposite. It was a group of 30 and none of us were from Germany, in total we were all from 16 different countries, I was the only one from the USA but I wasn't the worst at German, defiantly far from the best also though. Plus we were talking about the different governments we had and the problems and then about the German government and it was in a mix of German and English. On Wednesday we went to this museum on WWII which was really cool. You know honestly I only know the basics about world war 2, Hitler came to power awful things happened and we won in the end (I know more then that but that's the jest of it). But it was so cool seeing it from the German's point of view and how it wasn't a great time for them either. I mean even now they try to distance themselves from it as much as possible. For instance did you know in Nuremberg there is a building that looks similar to the coliseum but bigger and this whole area actually that Hitler got and was planing on building these humongous things, I mean really they were way out there and their uses were totally unpractical, but just to build these things were amazing, although some of them never got finished I think it was cool. Yes the reason for these buildings being built was bad and how they were built (by the prisoners of war)was also bad but they are/were there. The ones that were not finished were taken apart and other things were built on top of the grounds, but the ones that were finished are pretty much not in use. I mean part of the giant coliseum is the museum and then is rented out as a storage place for some big company. The others things are barely used because they don't want the rest of the world to see it as trying to worship Hitler even though that is not what they want. But that's the difference between countries I guess.

But not only learning about history from the German point of view, I got to meet some of the best people ever. Don't get me wrong I love the people I work with and they do all they can for me. But the people I met this past week get it, they understand the troubles their are by being an out lander. Its not many but I mean there was a night when there was a group of us sitting around and talking about our time here and even during the seminar we talked about the things. For example a lot of Germans with discriminate against us, I have never experienced anything more then dirty looks, some of the others hadn't noticed anything, but others had comments made at them, like one guy was talking about how some random old guy yelled at him on the street to go back home. We talked about how our German co-workers are sometimes not sensitive to things, and I explained about the time my on co-worker made a comment along the lines of "Well you can't go home so of course it [what days we get off] don't matter to you" and we talked about how hard it is/was to learn German. You know again I love the people I work with on a daily basis but it was just nice to be around people who are in the same place who I can say these things to and not have to explain it. We even touched on the topic about how we sometimes feel alone. I mean it was great and we also had a lot of fun times too! It was almost like being at band camp, you spend time with these amazing people with one purpose and it is a short time and most of the time you don't keep in touch with them but they touch your life in a special way. Although I do hope I get to stay in touch with some of these people they were truly great and I had a MUCH better time then I thought I would and I hope to go to another seminar sometime!

You know I don’t think I have ever explained why I love being at CircArtive Pimparello, and living on Rappenhof. It is such an amazing place, and smack dap in the middle of the forest. I mean to go shopping I have to drive 7 minutes or walk for 30 -45 min. But being in the middle of no-where has its advantages. I mean it is so peaceful when we don’t have kids. Let me try to give you a picture, imagine many houses, an office with apartments above it, and what we call the hopped house, which is where we have the eating room and the main kitchen and the rooms where we can teach circus and what not. Then we have the Circus House which is literally a building in the shape of a circus tent. (How cool is that!) And then you have fields around where the animals graze and then around everything is trees. Now during the summer you have the sun rising at 5 and the birds start singing and you know it is going to be a great day. You walk out and everything is green and the kids are running around (during the summer there are almost always kids here) the sky is blue and partly cloudy. I walk out of my room and down the stairs and around the corner and look left and look down on the circus valley, at this time, in the summer, filled with circus tents. The pictures you can capture are really unbelievable you would think they were photo shopped. Now that it is fall it has showed me even more beauty. Most of the trees surrounding the area are pine trees of some sort so they down turn colors but there are some that do and it was so fun watching them change although the one right by my room literally changed overnight pretty much and then a few days later most of the leaves were on the ground too. Its great now too because the sun rises about the time I need to get up so I can just look out the window in the morning and tell if I have to get up or not. I mean it is great walking around there and the sky being partly cloudy and it is just the perfect temperature and there is a small breeze and you are just surrounded by nature. You hear the birds singing, the bees buzzing the mosquitos getting in your face (ok that last one is not so cool but still). I mean the other day I actually saw a woodpecker. We were getting something out of the basement of one of the houses and it was in the tree nearby. There was also a really bad weather day, super cold, around 32 or so raining (and I’m convinced mixed with snow at some points) and super windy. We had to go down to the circus valley (empty now, the tents go down at the start of Sep) and put the fence back up and you could actually hear the wind howling. Like that is not an expression it can really howl. But besides all of that there is even a greater thing I get to see on almost a daily basis, which is the sun set, and of course some days it is not that great but I would say at LEAST 1 day a week there is an amazing sun set. I mean all sorts of fiery colors and the clouds line up perfectly. I have some pictures but really they are nothing compared to seeing the real thing. And don’t get me on the night sky, omg the amount of stars that it is possible to see! I have now actually seen the milky way (Well I saw it the times I was here prior to this trip but still), I could star gaze if I knew what to look for. And the moon, you know I have had people tell me how bright it can be but I mean really one the night of the full moon if the sky is clear you don’t need a flash light (I don’t use one anyway but still). You know Sven has called this place paradise before and some of the kids laugh and joke about it but I disagree I see where he is coming from there is a beauty here that is very hard to find anywhere else and some people don’t understand where I come from being that I grew up in the city but there is a raw beauty in nature that I think many people forget or just miss all together.